ABSTRACT
As France and Germany were cashing in on their lenient nuclear technology export policy and concluding power plant accords with Iran, the Ford administration was endeavoring to mollify Capitol Hill’s heightened non-proliferation concerns without alienating a nettled Shah from the U.S. orbit. In the meantime, a whole slew of external factors brought new challenges to already complicating circumstances that militated against nuclear cooperation between Tehran and Washington. Chief among them was the Shah’s dissatisfaction with the treatment Iran was meted out when Washington failed to include Tehran in the newly established Nuclear Supplier Group’s (NSG) fi rst meeting in November 1975 in London. The NSG, also known as the London Club, was a multinational arrangement devised by the nuclear-weapons-capable states to impose stringent control mechanisms on the transfer of the so-called dual-use non-weapon-specifi c items of proliferation risk to non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS) for fear of diversion for weaponization purposes. News of non-invitation came as a bolt from the blue to the Shah as he had expressed Tehran’s strong desire for the NSG members to adopt an interactive approach with the nuclear technology recipient countries instead of blackballing them through the cultish London Club. 1
Unimpressed by Iran’s exclusion from the NSG, in a December 1975 interview with Le Monde , Etemad unleashed a most scathing critique of the NSG’s cloakand-dagger approach towards proliferation that, in his view, epitomized a selfdefeating strategy by the Ford administration of creating a spawning ground where the atomic option would become more intriguing for nuclear aspirants and toll the death knell for the already bedeviled NPT regime.
